Bili Buzz - Popular Science, Nature, Medicine, Archeology, Future & Myths

Engineers find that ivy uses nanoparticles to climb walls

It’s about time someone recognized ivy’s ability to stick to walls, especially with geckos getting all the headlines lately. You had to figure that at some point a few scientists were going to sit down and start figuring out how to transfer ivy’s sticky technique to man-made materials. Now researchers from the University of Tennessee and Agilent Labs have determined that ivy actually secretes tiny nanoparticles to bind to surfaces.

The scientists found that ivy most likely sticks to surfaces through hydrogen bonding. Also, the material secreted is initially in a gel-like state—then it dries and hardens, and that section of the ivy becomes firmly attached.

Now the idea is to study the secretion mechanism in more detail, and explore potential engineering applications. Medgadget suggests that sutures and surgical adhesives are two possibilities. The research is described in a paper published in Nano Letters.

A remotely-operated undersea robot that clears trenches to bury pipelines and cables

One of the world’s biggest underwater robots, the new UT-1 Ultra Trencher weighs 60 tons on land, stands 18 feet tall, and measures nearly 26 feet wide. The remote-controlled Ultra Trencher can also rumble along at 2 to 3 knots, but its main job is cutting trenches for oil pipelines or telecommunications cables.

After being dispatched from a boat, the mobile-home-sized robot, which can work up to a mile below the surface, propels itself down to the ocean floor, lands over a pipeline, and shoots high-pressure jets of water on either side of the pipe, digging holes up to several feet wide and deep. The robot buries the pipeline or cable, protecting it from fishing, currents and other potentially damaging events.

Interested in an undersea workhorse? Check out the specs here.

Via Robots.net

Thought to be an anglerfish, its two forward-facing eyes are a first for the fish world

Divers have spotted a new type of fish off Ambon Island in Indonesian waters. The striped fish, which is about the size of a human fist, is believed to be an anglerfish because it crawls along the ground and into crevices using leglike pectoral fins. But unlike most anglerfish, this species does not have a “lure” dangling from its head to attract prey, so it probably represents a family of fish previously unknown to science, says Ted Pietsch, a professor of aquatic and fishery sciences at the University of Washington.

Three scuba divers from Maluku Divers first spotted and photographed one of the fish in late January. In search of international experts to identify the fish, they found Pietsch, who says the fish is unmistakably an anglerfish because of the leglike fins on its sides. Anglerfish are also known as frogfishes and toadfishes.

The fish’s most unusual feature is its flat face. Most fish have eyes on either side of their head, and Pietsch says he has never seen a fish with two forward-facing eyes in his 40 years of studying fish.

The new fish appears to be fleshy with tough skin, because it is able to squeeze itself into very small cracks in coral reefs without getting scratched. That may be how it has escaped human attention for so long.

The divers who discovered the fish kept quiet about it for a while. But now that another adult, two juveniles, and a mass of eggs have been seen, the word is out.